It didn’t take some Californians long to drop those water-conservation habits they had honed so well during the state’s last drought, which dragged on from December 2011 to March 2017. You would think that a weather catastrophe that, among other things, killed 102 million trees in the Golden State, would have left an enduring memory that would change our water-wasting ways forever.

Nope. As my colleague Paul Rogers points out in his story this week, millions of state residents curtailing their wise-use practices, even as current weather patterns this year are raising the troubling possibility that we may be in for yet another drought. With each passing month, a state survey shows, Californians have been slowly boosting the amount of water they use.

Even though residents had cut down on water use by 15 percent by last July, that number dropped to a small fraction by December, when compared to water use in 2013. In other words, we weren’t using as much water as we had in the past, but that amount of savings kept getting smaller.

But there are some places where the issue wasn’t simply saving less. Nope, in some California communities, water use has — incredibly — increased. Here’s a look at the seven communities in California where water use rose from last May to December, compared with the same period in 2013. Three are in Southern California, where low rainfall and hot temperatures contributed to the uptick, and four are in Northern California. Rainfall figures come compliments of Bay Area meteorologist Jan Null. Water use figures are from Rogers and another of my colleagues, data analyst Leigh Poitinger.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

Estero Municipal Improvement District

Use up: 5.8 percent (Note: The district’s director told this newspaper that the gauge on the main pipe that they use near Crystal Springs Reservoir to import water from the San Francisco PUC had malfunctioned in 2013. He said the SFPUC eventually fixed it, but that it skewed their baseline totals and that the real water use number for Estero should be -9 percent.)

Service population: 37,165

Service area: four square miles (Central San Mateo County, including Foster City)

Rainfall in 2017: 25.24 inches

Hmmm: According to the United States Census Bureau, Foster City has a total area of 19.8 square miles of which 16.1 square miles is – are you ready for this? – water. In other words, this bayside community is 81.07% H20.

Hmmm: In 2015, this out-of-nowhere community near Tracy was threatened with the loss of its water supplier and, said the LA Times at the time, “millions of dollars in landscaping and thousands of acres of crops are at risk. ‘If we’re unable to procure supplemental supplies, it’ll be catastrophic,’ said Rick Gilmore, general manager of the Byron Bethany Irrigation District, which supplies Mountain House with its water. ‘Even if we are successful, I don’t know how much water we’re going to be able to acquire to fulfill our needs.… Some folks are going to feel the pain.'”

Riverbank

Use up: 7 percent

Service population: 22,678 (as of 2010)

Service area: 4 square miles

Rainfall in 2017: 12.93 inches

Hmmm: The so-called “City of Action” in Stanislaus County has water in its veins: It was founded as a ferry crossing, it sits right on the Stanislaus River, and is sister cities with Fuyang, China, where 2.4 million people died from famine between 1959 and 1961. Why? Because the provincial Party secretary at the time pursued large water conservation projects that led to insufficient irrigation for local crops, leading to mass starvation.

Crescent City

Use up: 2.6 percent

Service population: 6,670 (2016)

Service Area: 2.4 square miles

Rainfall in 2017: 64.5 inches

Hmmm: “Water” should be this north-coast town’s middle name: With an annual rainfall of 71.24 inches, it’s one of the wettest places in California. In 1964, it became ground zero when it was hit by the largest and most destructive recorded tsunami to ever strike the United States Pacific Coast. The Good Friday earthquake off Anchorage, Alaska, had triggered a four-wave wall of water that reached 20 feet tall, taking out 289 buildings and businesses, 1,000 cars and 25 large fishing vessels, and leaving at least 12 people dead and many more injured.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Adelanto

Use up: 0.5 percent

Service population: 27,139

Service area: 53 square miles

Rainfall in 2017: 3.81 inches

Hmmm: The city’s 2016 Annual Water Quality Report informed residents that “while your drinking water meets the federal and state standard for arsenic, it does contain low levels of arsenic. The arsenic standard balances the current understanding of arsenic’s possible health effects against the costs of removing arsenic from drinking water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency continues to research the health effects of low levels of arsenic, which is a mineral known to cause cancer in humans at high concentrations and is linked to other health effects such as skin damage and circulatory problems.”

Calexico

Use up: 25.7 percent

Service population: 40,232 (2016)

Service area: 8.6 square miles

Rainfall in 2017: 1.77 inches

NOTE: The city of Calexico reported in the state data tables that they discovered a broken meter at their water plant which could help to explain the rise in usage.

Hmmm: The New River, which flows from Mexico and through Calexico before reaching the Salton Sea bears a riverine legacy that runs from horror story to success story: Once known as the “most polluted river in America,” the New “no longer carries that title,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported in 2014. “Birds are appearing along the river because of the marsh habitat. Fish have been introduced by federal Bureau of Fish and Wildlife. And while some pollution remains, many consider this an environmental success story.”

“We treat it as a waterway, as a river here in the U.S., Mexico treats it as a drain,” said Miguel Figueroa, former executive director of the Calexico New River Committee, whose members fought to improve the river’s health by pushing for a new sewage-treatment plant and other remedies.

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Hmmm: Imperial has an arid desert climate, and is one of the hottest cities in the United States, according to The Weather Channel. Imperial averages just about 3 inches of rain annually, most of it falling in December. But there are brief periods where it can be wetter, says Wikipedia. “The North American Monsoon typically increases the humidity from July through September. At times, the climate can resemble that of tropical areas in the Carribean. This leads to Daily thunderstorms that can bring hail, downpours, lightning, and dust storms more commonly known as Haboob.”

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.